By the Sword Read online

  As the guy retched and writhed in the dirt, Jack scooped up the cash and rings. He emptied the wallet and dropped it onto the guy’s back, then headed for the lights.

  He debated whether to troll for a third donor or call it a night. He mentally calculated that he had donations of about three hundred or so in cash and maybe an equal amount in pawnable gold. He’d set the goal of this year’s Park-a-thon at twelve hundred dollars. Didn’t look like he was going to make that without some extra effort. Which meant he’d have to come back tomorrow night and bag a couple more.

  And exhort them to give.

  Give till it hurt.

  2

  As he was coming up the slope toward Central Park West he saw an elderly, bearded gent dressed in an expensive-looking blue blazer and gray slacks trudging with a cane along the park side of the street.

  And about a dozen feet to Jack’s left, a skinny guy in dirty Levi’s and a frayed Hawaiian shirt burst from the bushes at a dead run. At first Jack thought he was running from someone, but noticed that he never glanced behind him. Which meant he was running toward something. He realized the guy was making a beeline for the old man.

  Jack paused a second. The smart part of him said to turn and walk back down the slope. It hated when he got involved in things like this, and reminded him of other times he’d played good Samaritan and landed in hot water. Besides, the area here was too open, too exposed. If Jack got involved he could be mistaken for the Hawaiian shirt’s partner, a description would start circulating, and life would get more complicated than it already was.

  Butt out.

  Sure. Sit back while this galloping glob of park scum bowled the old guy over, kicked him a few times, grabbed his wallet, then hightailed it back into the brush. Jack wasn’t sure he could stand by and let something like that happen right in front of him.

  A wise man he’d hung with during his early years in the city had advised him time and time again to walk away from a fight whenever possible. Then he’d always add: “But there are certain things I will not abide in my sight.”

  This looked to be something Jack could not abide in his sight.

  Besides, he was feeling kind of mean tonight.

  He spurted into a dash of his own toward the old gent. No way he was going to beat the aloha guy with the lead he had, but he could get there right after him and maybe disable him before he did any real damage. Nothing elaborate. Hit him in the back with both feet, break a few ribs and give his spine a whiplash he’d remember the rest of his life. Make sure Aloha was down to stay, then keep right on sprinting across Central Park West into yuppieville.

  Aloha was closing with his target, arms stretched out for the big shove, when the old guy stepped aside and stuck out his cane. Aloha went down on his belly and skidded face-first along the sidewalk, screaming curses all the way. When he stopped his slide, he began to roll to his feet.

  But the old guy was there, holding the bottom end of his cane in a two-handed grip like a golf club. He didn’t yell “Fore!” as he swung the metal handle around in a smooth, wide arc. Jack heard the crack when it landed against the side of Aloha’s skull. The mugger stiffened, then flopped back like a sack of flour.

  Jack stopped dead and stared, then began to laugh. He pumped a fist in the old guy’s direction.

  “Nice!”

  “I needed that,” the old dude said.

  Jack knew exactly how he felt. Still smiling, he broke into an easy jog, intending to give the old dude a wide berth on his way by. The fellow eyed him as he neared.

  “No worry,” Jack said, raising his empty palms. “I’m on your side.”

  The old guy had his cane by the handle again; he nonchalantly stepped over Aloha like he was so much refuse. The guy had style.

  “I know that, Jack.”

  Jack nearly tripped as he stuttered to a halt and turned.

  “Why’d you call me Jack?”

  The old man came abreast of him and stopped. Gray hair and beard, a wrinkled face, pale eyes.

  “Because that’s your name.”

  Jack scrutinized the man. Even though slightly stooped, he was still taller than Jack. Big guy. Old, but big. And a complete stranger. Jack didn’t like being recognized. Put him on edge. But he found something appealing about that half smile playing about the old dude’s lips.

  “Do I know you?”

  “No. My name’s Veilleur, by the way.” He offered his hand. “And I’ve wanted to meet you again for some time now.”

  “Again? When did we ever meet?”

  “In your youth.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “It’s not important. I’m sure it will come back to you. What’s important is now and getting reacquainted. I came out here tonight for just that purpose.”

  Jack shook his hand, baffled. “But who—?” And then a sixty-watter lit in his head. “You don’t happen to own a homburg, do you?”

  His smile broadened. “As a matter of fact I do. But it’s such a beautiful night I left it home.”

  For months now Jack had intermittently spotted a bearded old man in a homburg standing outside his apartment or Gia’s place. But no matter what he’d tried he’d never been able to catch or even get near the guy.

  And now here he was, chatting away as casually as could be.

  “Why have you been watching me?”

  “Trying to decide the right time to connect with you. Because it is time we joined forces. Past time, I’d say.”

  “Why didn’t you just knock on my door? Why all the cat-and-mouse stuff?”

  “I doubt very much you like people knowing the location of your door, let alone knocking on it.”

  Jack had to admit he had that right.

  “And besides,” Veilleur added, “you had more than enough on your plate at the time.”

  Jack sighed as the events of the past few months swirled around him. “True that. But—?”

  “Let’s walk, shall we?”

  They crossed Central Park West and headed toward Columbus Avenue in silence. Though they’d just met, Jack found something about the old guy that he couldn’t help liking and trusting. On a very deep, very basic, very primitive level he didn’t understand, he sensed a solidarity with Veilleur, a subliminal bond, as if they were kindred spirits.

  But when and where had they met before?

  “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

  Veilleur didn’t hesitate. “The end of life as we know it.”

  Somehow, Jack wasn’t surprised. He’d heard this before. He felt an enormous weight descend on him.

  “It’s coming, isn’t it.”

  He nodded. “Relentlessly moving our way. But the key fact to remember is it hasn’t arrived yet. Relentlessness does not confer inevitability. Look at your run-in with the rakoshi. What’s more relentless than a rakosh? Yet you defeated a shipload of them.”

  Jack stopped and grabbed Veilleur’s arm.

  “Wait a sec. Wait a sec. What do you know about rakoshi? And how do you know?”

  “I’m sensitive to certain things. I sensed their arrival. But I was more acutely aware of the necklaces worn by Kusum Bahkti and his sister.”

  Jack felt slightly numb. The only other people who knew about the rakoshi and the necklaces were the two most important people in his world—Gia and Vicky—plus two others: Abe and…

  “Did Kolabati send you?”

  “No. I wish I knew where she was. We may have need of her before long, but we have other concerns right now.”

  “‘We’?”

  “Yes. We.”

  Jack stared at Veilleur. “You’re him, aren’t you. You’re the one Herta told me about. You’re Glae—”

  The old man raised a hand. “I am Veilleur—Glenn Veilleur. That is the only name I answer to now. It is best it remains that way lest the other name is overheard.”

  “Gotcha,” Jack said, though he didn’t.

  So this was Glaeken, the Ally’s point man on Earth—or former
point man, rather. Jack had thought he’d be more impressive—taller, younger.

  “We must speak of other things, Jack. Many things.”

  There was an understatement. But where?

  Of course.

  “You like beer?”

  3

  “An interesting turn of phrase,” Veilleur said, pointing.

  Jack glanced up at Julio’s FREE BEER TOMORROW…sign over the bar. It had hung there so long, Jack no longer noticed it.

  “Yeah. Gets him in trouble sometimes with people who don’t get it.”

  They were each halfway through their first brew—a Yuengling lager for Jack, a Murphy’s Stout for Veilleur. In the light now Jack could see that Veilleur’s eyes were a bright, sparkling blue—almost as striking as Gia’s—in odd contrast to his craggy olive skin. He watched him pour more of the dark brown liquid into his glass and hold it up for inspection.

  “All these years and I still don’t understand why the bubbles sink instead of rise.”

  Jack knew the answer—someone had explained the simple physics of the phenomenon to him once—but he didn’t want to get into it now. No side-bars, no amusing anecdotes. Time to get to the point.

  Julio’s was relatively quiet tonight, leaving Jack and the old guy with the rear section pretty much to themselves. An arrangement Jack preferred on most occasions, but especially tonight.

  Probably best to conduct discussions about the end of the world—or at least the end of life as anyone knew it—without an audience.

  He glanced around the bar with its regulars and its drop-ins, drinking, talking, laughing, posing, making moves, all blissfully unaware of the endless war raging around them.

  Jack envied them, wishing he could return to the days, a little over a year ago, when he had shared their ignorance, when he thought he was captain of his life, navigator of his destiny.

  No longer. No more coincidences, he’d been told. Instead of steering his own course, he was being pushed this way and that to serve the purposes of two vast, unimaginable, unknowable cosmic…what? Forces? Entities? Beings? If they had names, no one knew them. Nothing so simple as Good and Evil. More like neutral and inimical. Forces that humans in the know had dubbed the Ally and the Otherness—although Jack’s dealings with the Ally had caused him only pain and loss. He’d learned he could trust it as an Ally only so far as his purposes were in tune with its agenda. If their purposes diverged, he’d be dropped like last week’s Village Voice, or crushed like a fly against a cosmic windshield.

  The man on the far side of the table had answers Jack desperately needed.

  “So you’re the one I’m supposed to replace.”

  Veilleur shrugged. “Should the need arise, someone is going to replace me. You aren’t the only candidate.”

  “I’m not?” Dare he hope? “Could’ve fooled me.”

  “You are a prime candidate—perhaps the prime candidate—but there are backups out there.”

  “Swell. I sound like a replacement part.”

  “In a very real sense you are. Don’t think of yourself as anything more than a tool. You’re not. But you became a tool that stood out among the other tools when you caused the death of the Twins.”

  Jack closed his eyes, remembering the gaping hole in the Earth that had swallowed a house and a pair of very strange men.

  “I was only defending myself. It was them or me. I even tried to save them at the end.”

  “But you were the proximate cause, and that shifted the mantle of heir apparent to you.”

  “But I don’t want it.”

  “No sane man would. But only a certain type of man qualifies. He must have a sense of duty and honor and—”

  Jack snorted. “Considering my lifestyle, I think I’d have a permanent spot on the bottom of the list.”

  “You may be what your society considers a career criminal, someone it would lock away if it knew you existed, but I gather you must be someone who does not easily turn his back on problems, and who finishes what he starts.”

  “What do you mean, ‘must be’?”

  Veilleur shrugged again. “Though I don’t know you all that well, those are the qualities the Ally requires, so I must assume you possess them.”

  Yeah, well, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Navel gazing wasn’t his thing. And even if it were, who had time?

  Jack leaned forward. “What’s it like being the Ally’s point man? Does it change you?”

  “You mean physically? Of course you’re changed, but you feel the same as you ever did. The only difference is you stop aging. If you get sick, you beat the infection quicker than anyone else; if wounded, you heal faster.”

  “Immortal.” The word tasted bitter.

  Veilleur nodded. “So to speak. But not indestructible. You can die, but it takes a lot to kill you. An awful lot. But it’s the living on and on that changes you. Watching your loved ones age and die while you stay fit, young, and vital.” Flashes of infinite hurt danced in his eyes. “Friends, lovers, children, family after family dying while you live on. Watching their wonder turn to hurt as you stay young while they grow old, stay well as they sicken; the hurt turning to anger as you refuse to grow old with them; and sometimes the anger turns to hate as they come to view your agelessness as betrayal.”

  He sighed and sipped his Murphy’s in silence while Jack put himself in those immortal shoes…watching Gia age while he didn’t…watching Vicky grow until she was physically his contemporary while her mother moved on through middle age and beyond…burying Gia…burying Vicky…

  The prospect made him ill.

  Veilleur broke the silence. “Maybe it is a betrayal of sorts not to tell them from the start that you’ll go on and they won’t, but I’ve tried it that way and it doesn’t work. First off, your lover doesn’t believe you, or perhaps concludes you’re slightly daft and accepts that. Because in the heat of new passion, her lips may acknowledge what you’ve told her, but her heart and mind do not embrace the possibility of it being true…until bitter, sad experience confirms that it is.” He shook his head. “Either way, it nearly always ends badly.”

  Jack saw a bleak landscape stretching before him—possibly.

  “So that’s what I’ve got to look forward to.”

  “Not necessarily. If the Adversary has his way, you and I and the rest of humanity will have a very short future.”

  “About a year or so, from what I’ve gathered.”

  “Yes…next spring if all goes according to his plans. But that’s only if his way is unimpeded. That’s if we don’t interfere with his plans.”

  “But if Ra—”

  Veilleur held up a hand. “I assume you’ve been warned about saying his name.”

  Jack nodded. “Seems weird but, yes, I’ve been warned.”

  He’d been told on a number of occasions over the past year never to utter the name Rasalom, to refer to him instead as the Adversary. Rasalom allowed no one to call him by his name or even speak it—although he used anagrams of it for himself. Say the real thing and somehow he knew—and came looking for you.

  Jack had witnessed what happened when Rasalom caught up to someone who’d been using his name. Not pretty.

  “How old is this Adversary?”

  Veilleur pursed his lips. “It’s hard to be sure, what with the fall and rise of civilizations, each keeping track of time in different ways. Counting from his first birth, he’s a few years older than I am—about fourteen, perhaps fifteen thousand years.”

  Jack sat in stunned silence. He’d expected him to be old, but…

  “Wait…you said ‘first’ birth?”

  “Yes. He’s hard to kill. I helped bring about his demise on our first meeting, but he didn’t stay dead. I thought I had finished him for good—so had the Ally—on the eve of World War Two. In fact, the Ally was so sure he was gone it freed me and allowed me to start aging.”

  “But wrong again.”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “But the
Twins—where did they come in?”

  “They were created to watch over things in the aftermath of the Adversary’s supposed death and my return to mortality. The Adversary was gone, but the Otherness was very much alive, so they restarted the yeniçeri to—”

  “The yeniçeri…” Jack ran a hand across his face. “Oh, man. What a nightmare. Wish I’d never heard of them.”

  “I’m sure the feeling is mutual. They answered to me until the fifteenth century when I locked the Adversary away—for good, I thought. After that, their numbers dwindled until the Twins resurrected them.”

  Jack pounded a fist on the table—once.

  “And if the Twins were still around, they’d be taking care of business and I wouldn’t be involved in any of this, and you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  He wanted to kick himself, but pushed back the regrets. If only was a futile game, and since he couldn’t exactly call Peabody and Sherman and have them crank up the Wayback machine, he’d have to play the hand he’d drawn.

  “Take it two steps further backward: If a German army patrol hadn’t breached a wall in the Adversary’s prison, he’d still be there. Or just one step back: If the Adversary had died back in 1941, as thought, even the Twins would have been redundant. By a quirk of fate—and this I believe was a true coincidence—his essence found a home in a man of, shall we say, unique origins. But though he was undetectable, he was also trapped and powerless. Until that man fathered a child. Then he was able to move into that child—become that child.”

  “When was this?”

  “Early in 1968.”

  Jack did a quick calculation: He’d been born in January of 1969, which meant…

  “Early 1968? Hey, I was conceived in sixty-eight.”

  “Not a coincidence. Once the Adversary merged with the fetus, the secret was out. Plans were set into motion. You were one of them.”

  Jack leaned back and stared at the wall. “So I was part of this even before I was born.”

  Some things he’d learned as a kid suddenly made sense.

  Veilleur nodded. “Perhaps I was too.”

  “Why all this cloak-and-dagger crap? Why don’t the Ally and the Otherness duke it out mano a mano—or cosmo a cosmo, or whatever they are?”